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Andrés Velasco, a former presidential candidate and finance minister of Chile, is the author of numerous books and papers on international economics and development. He has served on the faculty at Harvard, Columbia, and New York Universities.

This is in fact a very informative piece that covers a range of useful insights. It explicitly focuses on both developed and developing nations. It notes that "where the state has been slow to provide services", for-profit schools probably provide a useful, though not equal, education to the economically disadvantaged. It also supports the notion that, at least in developing nations, many of the economically disadvantaged are willing to pay for better education, and hence can be seen to value general education. It also notes the importance of parental motivation in affecting educational outcome. One large point that it seems to miss though, is that the developed nations with the best test scores, I seem to have read, tend to have a uniform national curriculum, testing, and equalized student funding. It's also to be noted that many of these nations have a greater ethnic homogeneity than in the US and much of the developing world. These national constructs are apt to exert a conformal pressure upon the country's students, and the population at large, with regards to educational expectations. As man is a social creature that displays a considerable degree of conformity, it may well be that national standards together with a greater sense of national identity, i.e. ethnic identity, constitute the most important factor affecting excellence in a country's public education system.

We have experienced this in large sclale in Portugal, what I call omsinumoc, or the reversed communism, where privates provide the supply and the state garantees demand, You can also call it like a concession state, typical of the medieval ages, with the known results.

PPPs are a big failure all over the world. Its very easy for private interests to capture government, and in the end instead of paying cheap for bad government services we end up paying much more for the same bad services.